Duchamp biography calvin tomkins

Marcel Duchamp's life is sometimes described as his greatest work of art, but not until now, with the publication of Calvin Tomkins's monumental biography, has the interplay of life and art been fully revealed.

Born into a large, closely knit bourgeois family, Duchamp followed his older brothers to Paris a few years before Cubism had revolutionized painting.

Tompkins is a Duchamp enthusiast but manages to wade through the mythology and bull to present the reader with the rosetta stone of Duchamp's life and art.

Tompkins is a Duchamp enthusiast but manages to wade through the mythology and bull to present the reader with the rosetta stone of Duchamp's life and art.

Duchamp: a biography.

A portrait of the artist Marcel Duchamp, an influential and admired artist of the 20th century.

This revised edition of Calvin Tomkins's Duchamp: A Biography arrives fifty-five years after the author's first meeting with Marcel Duchamp.

First published to great acclaim in , New Yorker writer and art critic Calvin Tomkins' biography of the influential artist Marcel Duchamp () has.

His emergence as an artist coincided with that historic moment, but throughout his long life he charted his own unique course - an open-ended adventure in which art was conceived primarily, in the spirit of Leonardo da Vinci, as a "mental act".

More decisively than anyone else, Duchamp advanced the idea that art should be its own reality and not an imitation of something outside itself. Arriving in New York in 1915 (America would become his adopted country), he was astonished to find that his reputation - as the French artist whose Nude Descending a Staircase had been the notorious sensation of the Armo